I wish I could report that “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest,” the last installment in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy, offered a conclusion as fearless and defiant as its ass-kicking protagonist, Lisbeth Salander.

Al Alexander

I wish I could report that “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest,” the last installment in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy, offered a conclusion as fearless and defiant as its ass-kicking protagonist, Lisbeth Salander.

Alas, it devolves into a finale as dull and plodding as her part-time lover and full-time advocate, Mikael Blomkvist. He takes center stage in “Hornet’s Nest,” as Lisbeth is largely relegated to a hospital bed hooked up to an IV. In other words, she’s getting a drip while we’re stuck with a drip.

Sure, Blomkvist is handsome in a 50ish Harrison Ford sort of way, but Michael Nyqvist, the perpetually pensive actor filling his gumshoes, is so flat and colorless he makes it difficult to remain attentive while traversing the movie’s dense, convoluted plot.

Nyqvist also errs in filling Blomkvist, a muckraking journalist (and Larsson’s alter-ego), with so much sanctimony and unmitigated self-righteousness that you’re tempted to root instead for the octogenarian bad guys he aims to expose as part of a labyrinth-esque plan to clear his beloved Lisbeth of an attempted murder charge.

It’s a credit to director Daniel Alfredson’s talent that he’s able to create a menacing air around a collection of geezers so old they can barely walk, let alone commit political assassinations to preserve their small, nefarious political faction inside the Swedish government.

Those targets, by the way, include Lisbeth (once again inhabited by the incomparable Noomi Rapace) and Lisbeth’s dastardly dad, Alexander Zalachenko (Georgi Staykov), the abusive ex-Soviet spy familiar to Millennium fans as the monster Lisbeth set ablaze when she was 12, and with whom she literally buried the ax at the end of the last film, “The Girl Who Played With Fire.”

Picking up right where that flick left off, “Hornet’s Nest” opens with Lisbeth and Zalachenko being rushed to a Goteborg hospital by helicopter, their faces bloodied and battered from the head wounds each sustained during their violent showdown in the closing minutes of “Fire.”

Lisbeth is immediately moved to the operating room, where the handsome and solicitous Dr. Jonasson fishes a bullet out of her brain. Not to worry. Unlike real people, literary characters seldom die from such catastrophic injuries, nor do they experience any of those annoying after-effects like paralysis.

No. If there’s anyone experiencing brain damage, it’s the audience, which is asked to swallow dozens of contrivances and ridiculous plot twists, as Blomkvist conspires with his Millennium magazine colleagues and a pair of government investigators to dissect The Section, the super-secret group of wealthy white guys appointed by the Swedish prime minister in the mid-1960s to protect national security by any means necessary.

Near the top of The Section’s hierarchy rests Lisbeth’s father, Zalachenko, the rascally Russkie who, we learn, used the group to front a host of illegal activities, including gun running and human trafficking. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, Larsson piles on by also saddling other Section members with a lascivious lust for little girls. All that’s missing is the twirling of their snowy-white mustaches.

It’s all rather tedious, given how the deck is so lopsidedly stacked in Lisbeth and Blomkvist’s favor. You know what’s coming; you just wish it didn’t take nearly 21/2 hours to get there. And when it does reach its long, drawn-out conclusion, you’re left asking, “Is that all there is?”

Instead of the bloody, violent butt kicking we’re so desperately craving, Alfredson and his screenwriter, Ulf Rydberg, give us a far less satisfying courtroom showdown between Lisbeth and her corrupt accusers. And therein lies the movie’s most glaring problem: It’s all talk and no action.

Even if it meant straying far from Larsson’s source novels, the film versions need our heavily pierced and even more heavily tattooed Lisbeth alive and kicking, not tethered to a hospital bed. After all, her violent vigilantism and bisexual shenanigans are what the people yearn.

They also want a story as layered and engrossing as the first film in the series, “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” which is currently being remade in Hollywood with David Fincher behind the camera and Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara in front of it.

Where “Dragon” was riveting, not to mention deliciously tawdry, its two sequels, both directed by Alfredson, are largely complacent and rote, reverting to the same clichés that plague most American-made thrillers.

At least “Hornet’s Nest” still has Lisbeth, or more precisely, Rapace. Even in a limited role like this one, the pixyish actress commands your attention whether she’s ravenously devouring a slice of pizza or facing down an accuser with a stare so intense it could pierce hardened steel. When she’s onscreen, the movie sizzles, and when she’s not, it fizzles.

THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET’S NEST (R for violence, sexual situations and adult subject matter.) Cast includes Noomi Rapace and Michael Nyqvist. Directed by Daniel Alfredson. (In Swedish with English subtitles.) 2 stars out of 4.